Brennan’s Blog

A shocking and disappointing story on Digg points to an interview will Bill Gates. He claims that the MacOS X is compromised daily while you would be hard pressed to find a single Vista exploit in a month. This comment is amazing and completely inaccurate given the track record Apple and Microsoft have had the past 7 years. And in just a matter of a few hours there are already nearly 400 comments on this Digg story. In that same timeframe a normally hot story may get 150 comments, so clearly the Microsoft Chairman has struck a sensitive nerve.

It is upsetting to many because claiming that Vista is the new Fort Knox of operating systems while the competitor is swiss cheese demonstrates either a complete disconnect from reality or some naive belief that Windows has not been having security problems the past several years. These claims just do not wash.

If I were running things I would have continued to allow Vista to be rolled out slowly to early adopters and allow a positive track record to emerge over the next 6 months. Then I would take the newfound confidence in Vista security and make the case to the masses. That is the only truly responsible approach to take. Slamming the competiion as less security that Vista is really just childish.

In all of the years of using a Mac I have never seen a real virus. Sure they do happen, but they have been very uncommon. Macs have just had a more stringent security policy to protect against compromises. We all know many of the compromises on Windows have been due to Outlook running macros from untrusted emails or Internet Explorer allowing malicious code to run as the user who likely had Administrative rights. How can you blame Apple for those decisions?

Now with Vista you will not run Internet Explorer or Outlook with Administrative rights. They have a whole new security system which should be less susceptible to the same security compromises. I realize the non-technical readers of this interview will not fully appreciate the advantages of the revised security model, but they do understand mud slinging, and they saw it here.

I encourage you to go and read the comments on the Digg story to see what the community really thinks about this interview. It will give you a good impression of things to come. I hope Gates does come to terms that his company's problems with Windows security did not end the day Vista was released. They just entered into a new phase which has a different set of security choices to make. Sure the old security holes may have been fixed, but new exploits are being developed by the bad guys all the time. That is a the one constant in computer security which Microsoft and all of us computer users need to understand.